More Smartness

Yesterday, Berg launched a teaser video about a mini-printer that would print a tailored feed of items you set on your smartphone. It’s a clever little device, looks awesome, but prints static feed info. It’s like a digital butler sending you a customized newspaper everyday. Then, talking about it with Teppo, I realized it could be so much more.

On this day and age, it baffles me that we don’t have smarter apps acting as digital assistants. Yes, there’s Siri. But Siri is an assistant you have to bug to fetch bits of info for you. Why don’t we have proactive digital assistants. The following scenario is entirely possible today using several different services. We just don’t have anything to mix and match all of this. Let’s call this assistant Digi.

• 7:00: Digi wakes you up: “Good Morning! It’s 7 o’clock and it’s a beautiful automn  day outside. Better use a sweater or light jacket today”.
• 7:02: You go to the bathroom and weigh yourself on the scale. The scale then sends the info to Digi: “Seems like you dropped another 200g! Good for you. You’re on track with your goal to loose 10kg by year end.”
• 7:05: Senses you moving about and figures you went into the kitchen. Digi then advises: “For breakfast, why don’t you try this quick an easy recipe? It will fit your diet.” Digi supposedly should know what ingredients I have based on what I’ve been adding and ticking off the shopping list.
• 7:10: Digi: “While you eat breakfast, here are the main news of the day”.
• 7:20: “Shall we go for a bit of a jog? You have about 25min, so here’s a good route to follow. Grab your sneakers!”
• 7:45: “Congratulations! You ran 2 miles and dropped 400 calories. Great work!”
• 8:00: Senses you leaving the house (no longer connected to the home wifi network): “Here’s how your day is looking: you have a meeting at 10 at BigCorps, then lunch with Steve at Little Italy,  then an afternoon in the office. Here’s your route to the BigCorps office (based on current traffic information).
• 8:40: As you drive, Digi gets a report about an accident ahead: “Accident ahead, changing course. You will arrive 10min later but still on time.”
• 9:45: As you approach BigCorps office, Digi kicks in: “BigCorps office is 500m ahead. Cheapest parking is 200m ahead. Turn right.”
• 10:00: “Time for your meeting. Here’s the meeting agenda.”
• 11:30: As the meeting is finished, Digi senses you move out. “Lunch with Steve in half an hour. There’s a machine to pay for your parking on Level 2. I’ll guide you there.”
• 11:50: Getting late. “You’re 10 minutes late. I’ll send a text to Steve to warn him.”
• 12:10: Arriving at the restaurant: “Michael has been here before. He recommends the Parma Pizza.”
• 13:40: After lunch, Digi senses you arrived at the office: “So, here’s what you have to deal with this afternoon.” And displays your to-do list.
• 18:10: “Time to leave. You have dinner with your parents at 20:00”.
• 18:25: As you drive home: “Since you’re early, Max Supermarket is on the day and you can pick up some groceries.”
• 18:35: As you enter the supermarket: “Don’t forget to pick up your dry cleaning”.
• 18:50: Once you tick off your last item in the shopping list: “You have two coupons to use.” It displays them on the screen.
• 19:50: “Your bottle of Douro Fab wine will go nicely with this recipe. Time to open it and let it rest”
• 22:20: After dinner: “Your favorite series is on on Channel 24. Do you want me to put in on or record it?”.

As you can see, there’s a way to link all sorts of different services we have today. All we need is someone willing to make us live in the future like we deserve.

Cashback? Yes, please!

One of the things I miss most from living in the UK is what they called cashback. Whenever you went into a store (mostly supermarkets), when you went to pay with your card, they would ask you if you wanted cashback. Basically it’s another way to withdraw money without having to use a cash machine. You would say “30 pounds, please” and that would be added to your account. It was great and a great time-saver too. I would love it if they did this in Portugal as well.

And it has loads of advantages for businesses: they free up money from the till, making it saver, since they’re exchanging hard cash for an electronic transaction, do its less money in the safe, less hassle to deposit. And it’s a great convenience for the costumer. It’s even easier for older customers.

I wish businesses could offer this in Portugal. Are you listening?

Carousels are lazy

The national Portuguese TV Channels website, RTP, just relaunched their website today and as many news based websites, they make extensive use of carousel widgets. This kind of widget was created to present a series of related visual content, like a photo album, in a space-saving fashion. However, it is now often abused as a lazy way to relinquish editorial power. Say that you have three possible news pieces to showcase. A proper content editor would look at them, and given his knowledge of the website audience would select one of them. Now there’s no need. Just throw them into a carousel widget and show all three. Let the user decide what he likes best.

Not only is this lazy editorials, it’s also a usability problem. Say you’re reading a newspaper and a news piece catches your eye. Later on, you might wanna show it to someone and you know where to find it relatively quick. Now take a website built with a lot of “boxes”, each box with its own tabs (which are fine to aggregate common themed content) and each tab with two or more carousel widget stops. You now have hundreds of different variations of the homepage. If something catched your attention in one of them, good luck finding it in 5 minutes time. It’s like having to sift through hundreds of newspapers to find the piece you’re interested in. Never mind the fact that in a few hours the news piece will be hidden forever into the dungeons of the content management system, but that’s a different war.

On top of this, most users won’t care to browse all these carousel stops. They’re often content with looking at the first page, so why use carousels at all for displaying news pieces?

The web might not constrained to the physical boundaries of a piece of paper, but that’s no reason to relinquish editorial control, so stop being lazy and embrace the constraints of your layout.

Diogo, a Great Loss for the World

It’s a really sad day when a great friend dies. It’s even sadder when he was one of the driving forces for innovation, entrepreneurship and social change in the world. He died yesterday at 43 years old and at this age he did much more than many people do in their whole lifetimes.

Diogo Vasconcelos was a great man. He always tried to push things forward, establish the connections, facilitate the interchanges. I had the good fortunate of meeting him while I was living in the UK and we became friends ever since. But my inspiration from him comes from way before.

I always had the entrepreneurship bug. At 11 I produced and published a small newspaper in order to earn some pocket cash to buy what I wanted and my parents couldn’t give me. When that wasn’t enought I started working “for real” at 15. But I always had the bug with me to start my own company. At the end  of the 90s Diogo was one of the people behind a new entrepreneurial magazine called “Ideias & Negócios”. They had a campaign on “Fire yourself now” that really lifted my spirits and I read their guides on how to create a company lots of times. At 30 I finally made it and created my own company and haven’t looked back since. So I have to thank Diogo for that.

Then I went to live in the UK in 2006. In 2008 a brief exchange on Twitter led us to meet for lunch in London. Diogo wasn’t a stuck-up guy. He was pretty famous back then and a lot of people with that status would scoff at but he always find time for everyone no matter what. At that first lunch he incited me to create what became UXLx in 2009.

We met many more times after that. He was always available, always willing to lend a hand, introduced me to a lot of people. But most of all, he inspired me and everyone else. He sponsored numerous events about entrepreneurship and social change and his enthusiasm was contagious. He could have accomplished much more if life had let him.

Diogo, you will be sorely missed. Thank you for the inspiration and the drive.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

First, a disclaimer: this post is mainly political and discusses the Portuguese and European economy, so if you’re not into that, feel free to skip ahead.

Yesterday, the Moody’s rating agency slashed the Portuguese rating by four points, leaving it at a “junk” level. It’s been a month since we had general elections and everyone is on board with the slashes and tax hikes the new government approved. For those of you unaware, the IMF is controlling Portugal’s finances and these new measures go beyond what the IMF demanded. So why the slashing? Everyone is baffled.

In the movie “Inside Job” there’s a part where we see the people responsible for these rating agencies (that I should remind you rated triple A a lot of American Banks just before they collapsed) excusing themselves by saying that they’re just opinion makers, that people are free to follow their advice or not. So, they’re not accountable. No one is. Once the US deregulated their banking industry, that led to the Credit crisis, the world has been facing economic hardship, but they were still left free to wreak havoc on international markets.

When the lucrative Credit Default Swap market collapsed, they were left looking for the next cash cow. And they turned their guns to Europe. A few European countries that were struggling to develop themselves into the general european level (often called the derogatory term PIIGS) were building infrastructure for the past 2 decades to prop themselves with the aid of their other European partners. Almost all of them had high stakes in state owned companies in Telcos and Utilities. They were fragile economics facing slow growth or growing on real estate alone so they were easy prey. Then the slashing began. They were barely making by, so a huge increase in lending rates, led them into red.

Now, these rating agencies are owned by investment banks. These investment banks advised some of their clients to buy into European debt. After all, it’s a huge return and the EU would surely help these failing countries to keep the Euro alive. And what happens when they’re out of the private lending market? They are forced to sell state owned companies at fire sale levels. And who will buy lots of stock? Those investment banks’ clients.

The only way out for Europe to stand its ground is to move tightly together into a Federalist state. A common currency, a common budget, a common fiscal policy. It’s now or never.